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Track(s) taken from CDA66935

The Dirge from Romeo and Juliet

First line:
Rise, rise, heart-breaking sighs
composer
1750
author of text
1750; for Shakespeare's play

Julia Gooding (soprano), Philippa Hyde (soprano), Joseph Cornwell (tenor), Andrew Dale Forbes (bass), Opera Restor'd, Peter Holman (conductor)
Recording details: November 1996
St Paul's Church, New Southgate, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Martin Compton
Engineered by Tony Faulkner
Release date: May 1997
Total duration: 4 minutes 26 seconds

Cover artwork: The Torture of Prometheus. Jean-Louis-César Lair (1781-1828)
Musée Crozatier, Le Puy en Velay, France / Giraudon / Bridgeman Images
 

Reviews

‘A very agreeable disc’ (Gramophone)

‘Another decisive blow to the old chestnut that only Handel wrote anything worth the candle in 18th-century England’ (Classic CD)

‘Strongly recommended’ (Hi-Fi News)
Boyce wrote some of his most successful theatre music for Garrick’s Shakespeare productions in the 1750s. The Dirge from Romeo and Juliet dates from the autumn of 1750, when Covent Garden and Drury Lane were running rival productions of the play. The novelty of the Covent Garden production was a funeral procession at the beginning of Act V, carrying Juliet’s supposedly dead body across the stage to Thomas Arne’s music. Not to be outdone, Garrick got Boyce to write a similar piece for Drury Lane, also incorporating the continuous tolling of a funeral bell; it survives in an autograph score in the Bodleian Library. This scene was included in Romeo and Juliet for about a century. Fanny Kemble wrote in 1878 that ‘even in my time [c1830] it was still performed, and an exact representation of a funeral procession, such as one meets every day in Rome, with torch-bearing priests, and a bier covered with its black velvet pall, embroidered with skull cross-bones, with a corpse-like figure stretched upon it, marched round the stage, chanting some portion of the fine Roman Catholic requiem music’. By then, it seems, plainsong had replaced the music by Arne and Boyce.

from notes by Peter Holman © 1997

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